Andrej Karpathy sees a widening gap in how people see LLM capabilities. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time. Many of my colleagues are living in a world where LLM capabilities are stunning, but it’s easy to forg...

DOHA, Qatar (October 28, 2026) – Shield AI, a leader in AI-powered mission autonomy, and Barzan Holdings Joint Venture RBAT signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at Milipol Qatar 2026 to explore the integration of Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software into Qatari-designed maritime autonomous defense and security solutions. This strategic partnership will build on established local capabilities in advanced maritime technologies, combining RBAT’s indigenous engineering expertise wit...

Since this will be the only source of this process on the Internet 1 , I figured I'd document a quick fan swap I did on a piece of test/reference equipment I'm running in my Atomic Clock Tower . I took my Torx T10 screwdriver and popped off the top cover. The screws required some force to loosen, as they were all secured with Loctite. The inside is simple and serviceable. There's a SpectraTime GRClok-1500 , with an integrated timing-grade GPS module, and a stabilized 10 MHz output 2...

Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with making more zines. I have been having so much fun! If you make zines and would like to trade, please send me an email ! You can also see a few of my downloadable zines in the Zines category of my website . send me an email Zines category of my website Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with making more zines. I have been having so much fun! If you make zines and would like to trade, please send me an email ! ...

Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible. That may sound like the premise of a Silicon Valley billionaire’s six-hour podcast, but it’s actually a statement about a remarkably stubborn problem: How do you translate a group of individual preferences into a single choice? In 1785, the French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet discovered that a majority can… Source Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible. That may sound like the premise of a ...

I am sorry to announce that the message.casa service will soon be closing. 2026-10-25 9:40 Some people have taken advantage of the service’s anonymity to send threatening messages that have been classified as terrorist in nature by governmental agencies. Moderation, which I had hoped would be a one-off, is becoming very difficult to manage. It is no longer possible to create new accounts on the platform, and it will be permanently closed on 31 December 2026. For your information, the reput...

A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play with. A common social format is the Cube draft or Cube. You and a group select and refine ~300-700 cards to create a custom set. While many players enjoy the process of selecting and refining every single card, I usually know a few...

After hiking up to the end of the ridge, it was now time to scout the initial part. The starting point is some 25km east of where I parked the car last time around, at the parking spot of the Italian ossuary in the lovely town of Kobarid. The plan is to walk my way up till the beginning of the ridge, reaching Starijski Vrh at the foothills of Mount Stol, the highest point of the entire ridge, at 1673 meters. The reason why I’m doing this hike is that I read conflicting information abou...

None of the popular lyric sites have listings for classical and instrumental music, for reasons that elude me. As a public service, I’ve decided to address this in a series titled missing lyrics . You’re welcome. Below are the lyrics for Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso ( The Jester’s Aubade ), the fourth of the five movements of his piano suite Miroirs : By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-28. None of the popular lyric sites have listings for classical and instrumental music, for...

tl;dr; chameleon-rs is my Rust implementation of Chameleon for Python web apps. It runs existing templates unchanged, with faster rendering, async support, and support for free-threaded Python. The Chameleon HTML (template) language is one of my favorites. It was the default in Pyramid when I used to use that framework for my projects. I’ve since created fastapi-chameleon and chameleon-flask to allow you to easily use Chameleon on these more modern web frameworks. Why modernize Cham...

What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang out”. The infinite vacation, as in the Culture novels. I think this won’t work. “Hanging out” implies: Other people exist. They want to hang out with you. You want to hang out with them. And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these assumptions. Other people exist The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear...

Many people think 1 that getting “good at AI” is trivial. Sure, with some early models there were tricks you had to learn, 2 but current models don’t need them. Even if there are different tricks 3 that work on current models, the next generation will render them obsolete, so why bother? Just tell the model what you want it to do. This take is particularly popular with the anti-AI crowd, who scoff 4 at the idea that AI-reluctant people are being left behind, or that it might be irres...

It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Someti...

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons . The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer...

Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing thing...

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious 1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to tr...

Have you seen this ? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out . Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep scrolling up. Last time I did this it took me 12 minutes and 51 seconds, but the whole time I had a way out. We get a button on the screen that lets us punch out any time we want: I quit . But do other Americans get an easy...

The Gate of the Feral Gods Author: Matt Dinniman Genre: Sci-fi Released: 2021 Rating: ★★★☆☆ New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure. You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent. Surviving in a multilevel dungeon that also happens to be the set of the galaxy’s most watched game show has taught Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, that there’s only one thing they can count on apart from each they never kno...

Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents. Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents.

A lot of software spends its time mapping strings to values. A web server must identify the HTTP method ( GET , POST , …). It must recognize header names. A URL parser must recognize the protocol ( http , https , ftp , …). A compiler must recognize keywords. In C++, the default approach is to put the strings in a std::unordered_map . std :: unordered_map methods = { { "GET" , Method :: GET }, { "POST" , Method :: POST }, { "PUT" , Method :: PUT }, { "...

By Praneeth Yenugutala , Victor Dusa , Anastasia Samoilova , Megan Ren , Justin Wei , Marcelo Mayworm At Netflix, data and machine learning practitioners run millions of workloads each day across orchestration systems and compute engines such as Titus, Spark, Trino, and Druid. On peak days, roughly 100,000 workloads fail. When workloads fail, the failure itself is only the beginning. Someone still needs to find the useful signal in several logs, decide whether the cause sits in their code...

(Lance and Bill did a vidcast about the OpenAI Document Drop. See  here . My spellcheck thinks that vidcast and OpenAI are not words.)   The Metric TSP problem is TSP where, for all vertices \(x,y,z\),                                      \(w(x,z) \le  w(x,y) + w(y,z) \). In 1976 Christofides and Serdyukov (independently of each other) showed that there is a poly time algorithm for a 1.5-approx to Metric TSP. Some people thought the 1.5 could be improved. Some people thoug...

The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at minimum lot sizes, Boeing’s next 737 MAX, Fervo short sellers, Figure AI’s training data, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a piece about manufacturing isotopes that should be o...